Ms. Hien Nguyen
Women Interrogating Trade & Corporate Hegemony (WITCH) Programme Officer,
Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
Good morning,
Thank you very much for having me today to deliver this speech.
My name is Hien Nguyen from Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD). APWLD is a network of 265 members represent groups of diverse women from 30 countries in Asia and the Pacific. I want to focus on gender in Pillar 1 today.
We all recognise that “Trade is NOT gender neutral”.
Women still carry the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work. Globally, women perform 76.2% of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men. In Asia and the Pacific, women spend more than four times more than men on unpaid care work. As such, women rely much more heavily on public services and related social infrastructure than men. Women are the primary users of public services, the majority of workers in the public sector and the main providers of unpaid care work when public services are cut. Trade agreements in the past have caused developing countries significant revenue loss. It is estimated that in the period 2017-2020, developing countries and Least Developed countries lost $56 billion of tariff revenue. This is an important source of government spending on public services. Any governments lose revenue due to trade agreements, women will suffer the most.
Therefore, women in developing countries demand the governments in IPEF to do no harm to women by not accepting any provisions which may threaten women including by causing government revenue loss. For example,
- the digital chapter in the IPEF trade pillar must not include any restrictions on the ability to impose customs duties on electronic transmissions because this is an important and growing source of potential revenue as more products become digitised. E.g. Thailand will lose US$3.6 billion if this provision on preventing IPEF governments from imposing tariffs when their residents are downloading movies, songs, ebooks, videogames, software etc is agreed to in IPEF.
- there should not be any restrictions on the ability to impose digital services taxes. Digital services taxes are being used by a number of IPEF countries both developed and developing as an important way to broaden the tax revenue base and level the playing field etc.
- there should not be any restrictions on licensing fees (e.g. in the services domestic regulation disciplines in the IPEF trade pillar). This can be an important source of revenue especially for local governments provide important public services e.g. in Malaysia it can be 7% of the local government’s revenue and in some US states they use this revenue to provide police and fire department services etc.
- there should not be any provisions that make it more difficult to collect taxes e.g.:
- a) cross-border data flow provisions in the digital chapter of the IPEF trade pillar that would prevent governments from requiring a copy of tax records to be stored domestically (as IPEF countries like New Zealand do) so it is easy to check for tax evasion.
- b) source code provisions in the digital chapter of the IPEF pillar that could prevent governments from checking the software source code used in: tax planning etc to check for tax evasion (the way the US government does).
- c) good regulatory practices provisions that make it more difficult, slower and more expensive to amend regulations since tax law frequently has to be amended to close loopholes as companies find them etc.
I thank you
Ms. Lorelei Covero
Associate Researcher, Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants
Good morning, everyone. Magandang umaga sa ating lahat. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak on behalf of the migrants’ sector.
I’m Lorelei Covero from the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants and the Network for the Protection of Women Migrants’ Rights, a network of migrants and women’s rights groups and advocates.
Today, there are over 270 million migrants around the world. However, migration is highly controlled, the mobility of migrants is highly restricted, and the human rights of migrants are mostly denied for the sake of super profits.
Migrants are mainly recruited to perform 3D jobs — dirty, difficult, and dangerous — in construction, agriculture, mining, and other service sectors.
Most migrants are excluded from minimum wage legislation and paid as cheap as 1/3 of the wage of local workers. They are excluded from labour legislation and other laws and work without standard working hours. Women migrants, in particular, are designated in stereotyped jobs that are treated as low-skilled and are given low wages, such as in domestic work, garment industry, hospitality sector, caregiving, jobs in plantations, entertainment and healthcare. The most common problems encountered by women migrants in workplaces are low pay, mandatory live-in, long working hours, denial of rest and holidays, denial to change employment and right to residency, and suffer the worst forms of abuse as verbal, physical and sexual abuses.
And so, given the situation of migrants, we are concerned that the IPEF will further worsen the working conditions and further abuse the rights of migrants.
In Pillar 1:
For workers including migrant workers, digital trade rules can preclude effective regulation of digital technologies’ increasing use in the world of work. Problems will arise from embedded biases in algorithms being used in hiring, in workplace management, work surveillance and promotion of precarious labour arrangements in the gig economy. For migrant workers, this will have the effect of further fueling social bias and worsening their already precarious labor situation.
Another source of concern is the chapter on good regulatory practices. If we are to follow earlier models of good governance criteria, the provision is likely to encroach on countries’ regulatory space in favour of pro-corporate policies without regard for public interest. For example, deregulation of essential public services such as health, housing, education, transportation will result in further inaccessibility of these services to migrants and their families back home. Another example, if countries’ revenue resources such as taxing and licensing foreign big business will be encroached upon, funds for already dwindling public services will further shrink.
And so in conclusion, we ask that you uphold the human rights and welfare of migrants and other vulnerable sectors in the negotiations as well as observe the principles of transparency and accountability as duty-bearers.
For Pillar 2:
Migrants are often blamed whenever crises arise. During the Covid-19 pandemic for example, many migrants are stigmatized as coronavirus carriers and spreaders and excluded from relief and benefits. In times of financial crisis, it is the migrant workers, who are among the first to be sacrificed though massive lay-offs and deportations, arrests and imprisonment, stigmatization, and discrimination. Under very repressive migration regimes the already undervalued migrant labour became even cheaper, docile, and disposable.
In Pillar 2 We ask the question, resilience for whom?
In the first place, the capacity to pursue the IPEF resilience agenda largely rests with large corporations which are often the only ones who can bear the costs for crucial activities such as supply chain mapping. Moreover, lead firms derive their power over suppliers from their monopoly over information critical to supply chain management.
In reality, we have already seen that workers bore the brunt of the resilience agenda of preventing disruptions in production during the pandemic, as working conditions deteriorated and labour’s income share declined in many countries. Pandemic-related lockdowns saw factory workers, now seen as “essential”, forced to stay in their workplaces, exposed to the virus and unable to go home for prolonged periods of time. Migrant workers in critical sectors were particularly vulnerable, with many reported instances of labour rights violations. White-collar workers who were made to work from home were subjected to intrusive surveillance software and algorithmic management.
And so in conclusion, we urge that you uphold the human rights and welfare of migrants and other vulnerable sectors in the negotiations as well as observe the principles of transparency and accountability as duty-bearers.
Thank you very much.
